Go read Nilay Patel’s coverage of the new Apple v. Samsung lawsuit. I’ll wait for you to come back.
Ok. Welcome back. Crazy stuff right? To me, its pretty clear that Samsung intentionally ripped off the look and feel of iOS and Apple’s hardware design when making its phones and Android UI, TouchWiz.
This is about Samsung’s design choices. And while Patel is careful not to draw parallels between this suit and the one Apple had against Microsoft in the mid–1990s.
He says:
Oh, and don’t conflate trade dress with Apple’s doomed copyright-based “look and feel” lawsuit against Microsoft in the 90s — it’s totally different. Trade dress law is well-established, and Apple itself has a history of successfully pursuing trade dress claims in the Northern District of California. In 2000 the company sued both eMachines and a company called Future Power for knocking off the iMac’s trade dress, winning injunctions in both cases and eventually getting extremely restrictive settlements that effectively removed the infringing products from the marketplace.
The Microsoft case is extremely interesting, though.
Apple sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard after Windows 2.0 was released. Windows 1.0 contained some GUI components licensed by Apple, but version 2.0 went beyond the legal agreements, and, according to Apple, looked and felt too much like the Mac OS.
The court ruled:
Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]…
Apple lost the case because the 10 GUI elements not covered in the Windows 1.0 licensing deal weren’t originally created by Apple, or were considered the “only way” such an idea could be expressed within a UI. That said, the court clearly established that analytical dissection of user interfaces are critical when dealing with copyright issues.
On that basis, Samsung is clearly in trouble. TouchWiz’s app icons, the Springboard with App Dock (which no other Android skin has) and coloring are all designed to trick customers into thinking they’re getting an iPhone-like product. While Apple can’t — and isn’t — arguing that TouchWiz looks and feels like iOS, it’s case that numerous components of the TouchWiz GUI look a lot like their iOS counterparts seems solid.